Plugin - Architecture : Programming Using Python [Tutorial]

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Python!!! She, is a beauty. I have been in love with her lately. At work, I was asked to write an application that supports a plugin architecture. After 4 days of mind-screwing thinking,  I came up with a model that supports plugin architecture. I honestly don't know if this is the efficient way. But, it works. So here is a tutorial for you. This is just a quick tutorial.

Consider an example : you need to write a program that gets a string input from console and perfoms a case-swap and returns back to you. So let us code three plugins for that. First plugin is to get a value from the console, then to swap case and the last plugin to print the result. Therefore let us divide the components into 5 parts.

1. A Class File : To hold all the data that are shared by the plugins at run-time
2. Plugin 1 : To get a string from console 
3. Plugin 2 : To Swap Cases
4. Plugin 3 : To print the result 
5. The Main Program

Implementation:

1. You need a class file to hold all the data that are share by the plugins and the main program. so lets deal with that file first. Lets call this file as AppData.py

class AppDataClass:
 global ipString
 global opString

2. The First Plugin : ReadInput.py

from AppData import AppDataClass
def init():
 AppDataClass.ipString = str(raw_input("EnTeR a StRiNg : "))

3. The next plugin : SwapCase.py

from AppData import AppDataClass
def init():
 AppDataClass.opString = AppDataClass.ipString.swapcase()

4.The Final Plugin : PrintOutput.py

from AppData import AppDataClass
def init():
 print AppDataClass.ipString.swapcase()

5. the main program : PluginExample.py

import imp
from AppData import AppDataClass

def main():

 AppDataClass.ipString = ''
 AppDataClass.opString = ''
 ModuleNameList = ['ReadInput','SwapCase','PrintOutput']
 
 for ModuleName in ModuleNameList:
  mFile, mPath, mDescription = imp.find_module(ModuleName,['PLUGINS/'])
  mObject = imp.load_module(ModuleName, mFile, mPath, mDescription)
  mObject.init()
  
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
 main()

Points to ponder :

I have used init() method as an entry point to all the plugins above. So that when we import modules, we know which is the entrypoint of the plugin.